COVID Film Festival: Day One

I have COVID.

My wife has been saying it's inevitable that we would all soon get it, now that they've lifted the last of the mask mandates (we had to wear them on public transportation up until about a week ago), and true enough, my time has come.

Given that I managed to hold out for more than 26 months from when people really started talking about it, it was quite surreal to see that second line come up on the RAT test. (Note: Saying "RAT test" is kind of like saying "ATM machine," but everyone else does it so I will too.) But I kind of knew it would, because the small cough I'd had for a day or two had gotten worse, and now there was snot involved, and a feeling of wooziness and sweating. (Though my temperature was in the normal range. Go figure.)

I'd almost gotten to the point of scoffing at the possibility of getting COVID, not because I feel like I'm impervious to it or because being triple-vaccinated makes it impossible I would get it. We all know now that the vaccine doesn't prevent you from getting it, if it ever did, but it usually makes the symptoms more manageable. No, I was kind of starting to doubt it because every time I've had symptoms of something in the past, I have not tested positive. Even when my younger son tested positive for it about three weeks ago, and I also felt shitty, I returned negative tests on four straight days before I decided I was just wasting tests, especially since I felt better by then.

My wife has even begun to tease me a bit, like I'm a hypochondriac, which is funny coming from her because she is so vigilant about all the right things to do when it comes to COVID.

Well, now I have it and it could be a lot worse. I'm coughing some, I'm sneezing some, I have occasional pains in my chest. But none of these are really dominating me. I wouldn't want to focus on work, and I'm on my first official sick day today after a long weekend. But I can obviously do things like write this blog post.

Oh, and watch a movie marathon on the projector on my garage wall.

That's right, I'm isolating from my family, who have been testing negative, in our garage. My wife actually offered me the upstairs wing, where my younger son also sleeps, since he's had it recently and probably does not need to be isolated from me (though we're doing that anyway out of an abundance of caution). She'd sleep on the couch. But I know she doesn't sleep well on the couch, and I sleep well anywhere, including a mishmash of beanbag chairs in our garage, which is where I am typing this right now.

And because I have COVID, there's no judgment from anyone if I just sit here and watch movies. And sports, but movies is what I want to talk to you about today, because this is not a sports blog. (Though I've got to write quickly because my Celtics are scheduled to try to finish off the Nets in about 20 minutes, and I've got baseball after that -- then more movies.)

Yesterday I watched four, and I thought I would write a little something about each of them.

Titanic at 25

James Camerson's Oscar-winning and box office-busting epic is turning 25 this year, though that's not the reason I watched it yesterday. I watched it as the latest in my series of revisiting all my former #1 movies in 2022, in order to rank them at the end of the year. It's the ninth I've watched and I've got 17 more to go.

It's the first time I watched it in ten years since it had that theatrical 3D re-release, and again, it still holds up for me. The visuals hold up, outside of the digital people on the deck of the ship during the "helicopter shots," and they aren't on screen for very long and aren't much of a distraction. But more than that the story still holds up in all its epic romantic grandeur. I still feel like this is sort of the epitome of all the elements of movie magic coming together in one 195-minute movie, and on this, which I think is my fifth viewing, it's still just as good for me as it was the first time. I still get choked up in about the same three predicable spots.

Without COVID, I'm not really sure when I would have gotten the chance to watch this. I mean theoretically if I started just after 9 at night, I'd finish just after midnight, but we all know you have to take breaks in a three-hour movie. Starting at 11 a.m. was much better.

I kind of thought I would half-watch it and do other things on my computer, given the number of times I've seen it and how well I know it. The fact that I didn't is an indication of how much I still love it. I still want to take in all the details. 

I've also been watching James Cameron on MasterClass, and though I haven't seen him discuss anything related to Titanic yet, I did notice a technique that I hadn't previously ascribed to him. In a breakdown of the nightclub scene in The Terminator, Cameron made mention of his use of the POV perspective of his camera, and I noticed that in use a couple times in Titanic. 

She was only 15 years old

Forgive the bad Michael Caine paraphrase, or at least a paraphrase of their Michael Caine impersonation in The Trip.

I'd planned to follow Titanic with something shorter and lighter and preferably something I hadn't seen, but when I saw Can't Buy Me Love available for streaming on Disney+, I knew it was time to revisit this 1980s favorite that I probably haven't seen in 30 years.

This one also holds up for me, and part of that is the great performance of Amanda Peterson as Cindy Mancini, the puppy dog Ronald Miller's love interest. 

Poor Amanda Peterson, who died of a drug overdose in 2015. (So much for being lighter!)

I had forgotten how she died and thought it was either an accident or a rare disease, but on a check on Wikipedia I noticed it was, indeed, this most depressingly common of celebrity deaths. Not that you could really call her a full celebrity, since she didn't work a lot after Can't Buy Me Love -- though maybe that was the problem.

I don't know why she didn't work more because she's so good in this movie. She has depth and soul and does quite a lot of non-verbal acting. And what makes that even crazier is that "she was only 15 years old."

When I saw that her death in 2015 was only a few days shy of her 44th birthday, I did some quick math and realized she was born in 1971, just two years before I was. And not the start of 1971 either, but in the summer. So that means when the movie was released in the summer of 1987, she had only just turned 16 -- which means she was 15 while filming.

How often do you see an actor playing a high school student who is actually younger than the character is supposed to be? She's playing a high school senior. Far more common is the actress playing her friend Patty, Darcy DeMoss, who was 23 at the time of filming. Yet even at this tender young age, Peterson had an instinct and a maturity that allowed her, for example, to play drunk in this really convincing and adorable way, while also seeming like a grown-up in her other scenes -- an old soul. It's really rather remarkable.

Koo

My April movie for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, where you are randomly assigned the highest ranked movie you haven't seen from another member's chart, was Kin-dza-dza, a 1986 Russian film directed by Georgiy Daneliya. And what an absurd little oddity this is.

It involves two Russian men in present day who meet a homeless person who tells them he's from another planet. They don't believe it, but when he transports them there, well, they really have no choice. It's a desert planet and they meet the natives, who at first appear only to speak one word: "Koo." They also have this funny tradition of bowing in deferment to each other that they expect to be reciprocated.

The film involves the two men's attempt to return to Earth, but it's so much more. We learn all their terminology over the course of the movie, and then there's even a glossary of terms that appears during the intermission. There we officially learn what a variety of words mean -- and that "koo" means all other words.

I liken it in my mind to what would happen if Tarkovsky, Jodorowsky and Gilliam all got together to make a movie. It's pretty much a delight and it can be watched for free on YouTube if you're interested.

And finishing with Shadow in the Cloud

Maybe because it's been only 15 months since I saw this the first time, I don't have a new takeaway about Shadow in the Cloud, which was among my top 20 of 2021. I guess I enjoyed it about the same amount.

I suppose the takeaway is a reminder that a movie doesn't need to be long to be effective. This is barely over 80 minutes, which is why I needed it to finish the day and get to bed at a reasonable time. I'm supposed to be recovering from COVID, in case I forgot.

Whether this festival will last only one more day, or more than that, remains to be seen. 

Piloting into 2021

I'm done with all the year-end posts, so time to get back to pointing out coincidences, right?

This is a pretty good one: The first two movies I've seen since closing my year-end rankings were about World War II fighter pilots.

You could say I planned it, but you'd be wrong.

A Matter of Life and Death, the most prominent Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger movie I had yet to see, jumped to the front of my queue by virtue of it being discussed on the podcast The Next Picture Show, where they match a classic film with a new release to discuss the former's influence on the latter over a pair of consecutive episodes. I had already seen the latter, Soul, and figured I might as well whack out a viewing of the former so I could get something out of both episodes of the podcast. The film is not widely available, but it's on YouTube so I got to work.

Simply put, I loved this. Just a few days after the post in which I mentioned ten great films I saw in 2020 that weren't released in 2020, I'm pretty sure I've already got one of my entries for the corresponding post I'll write a year from now. 

The 1946 film is about a British fighter pilot (David Niven) who has a distress call with a female American dispatcher (Kim Huner) as his plane is engulfed in flames over the English Channel. Before he jumps, without a parachute, to his certain death, the two kind of fall for each other in the intensity of the moment. However, something goes wrong with the afterlife bureaucracy -- something about the heavy fog over Britain -- and he washes up on shore, unharmed, in spitting distance of where the dispatcher is stationed. As the two finally meet each other and forge a genuine connection that might be love, Niven is visited by representatives from that afterlife (which is pictured in black and white to the technicolor of the earthly settings), who try to correct the mistake. But Niven now figures he's got a case to be made about why he should stay on earth.

Connections to Soul pretty obvious, no?

I was flabbergasted not only by the film's great script, but by the techniques it uses, unusual in a film from that era, to create supernatural settings and images of other worlds. The film opens on an image of the universe before panning down to Niven's doomed plane, and the afterlife is replete with imagery of an otherworldly waystation involving fantastical architecture. The Archers (the nickname for this pair of directors) employ other fascinating techniques like freeze frame that were not regularly used at the time. The shot seen from behind the closing eyelid of a person going into surgery, which would have required the construction of a large papier mache eyeball, just furthers this film's sense of delightful creativity.

I could go on and on about A Matter of Life and Death, but we have a second film to get to. Which is also worth going on about.

The first trailer I saw for a 2021 movie was Shadow in the Cloud, and it struck me right away as the first film I might see for my newly launched list. It seemed the perfect example of the type of film that gets released early in the year to try to capture an audience, a wild genre mashup that might be too eccentric to compete with the big summer releases but could certainly carve out a niche early in the year. Of course, that's using conventional release logic, which certainly doesn't apply during a pandemic. Though it's starting out as an old-fashioned conventional year in Australia, considering that this movie did get released in January and I did see it in the cinema.

Shadow in the Cloud is a New Zealand production from a director I had never heard of, Roseanne Liang, a Kiwi of Chinese descent. It stars Chloe Grace Moretz -- whom I loved when she was a kid, but have not really liked for the past five years -- as a woman boarding a plane from New Zealand to Samoa during World War II. She's an officer with flying experience but of course she is derided and degraded by the sexist all-male crew who don't understand why there's a woman on board their plane. They have orders for her to be there and she's escorting a high-value package, so they reluctantly accept her on board but make her sit in the lower turret for takeoff. Where she gets stuck when a literal gremlin starts dismantling the plane mid-flight.

This movie is an absolute gas. It's set in World War II but has a driving early 80s synth score. It's got a CGI gremlin and also a lot of thrilling air battle sequences. But there are also parts of it that could be a stage play, in the best possible sense. Simply put, it's a jolt of adrenaline to start us off right on the new year.

I may step away from movies about World War II pilots for my third new-to-me movie in 2021, but you never know with these things.